Towards Composable Architecture: the importance of the API

In this article you’ll find:

• What Composable Business is – with an example
• What APIs allow for in your business
• The main benefits of Packaged Business Capabilities

A vision of the future

IMAGINE 20 years from now. You are in a quarterly meeting discussing the progress of A Certain Strategy Initiative in your company. Present at the meeting are the following people:

• Initiative owner
• her team
• CFO
• COO
• and you, dear reader.

For the last 5-10 minutes, you’ve been fed information to participate in a meaningful discussion on the subject. It still isn’t a real-time market stock value indicator constantly present in the corner of your eye. That technology isn’t there yet (however, every few years, Google claims their eyeglass technology will be available a few years down the line). What you have at your disposal are charts and reports, scraps of text and pictures, integrated into the same virtual meeting room where you’re sitting now. They look like a deck of cards ready to be played at the moment. 

In the past, you prepared a presentation for the meeting. Today, the whole team collaborates on the presentation. Presentation of a problem.

Moreover, the information given to each person is personalized to reflect their own involvement in the initiative. Take note that as management, you are not looking for alignment in the data but in your collective assessment of the situation. The data is presented so that you disagree with each other in a constructive way, and through a discussion, you come to an agreement. There is no easy way out, but that’s what humans are for in a company nowadays. What is predictable and straightforward is automated.

You still have 20 minutes of prep session before the discussion starts.

The goal of this meeting is to determine the following decisions:

• Whether to increase or decrease funding for this initiative
• By how many percent
• And what other resources should be allocated for the initiative to operate for the next three months

A Discovery Analyst prepared data for each of you. That person’s role is to define and update personalized views into company data related to the goal of the meeting.

Some things, such as the company’s strategic goals, are always present in the virtual room. Your view also shows you current financial data and other initiatives in the strategic portfolio of your company so that you’ll be able to play the balancing role in the act.

You’ve also written some questions in the last three months regarding the project in anticipation of this meeting. And here they are, ready to be asked… if there’s still a need for these questions.

This filtering of egregious amounts of data from your company was just a few hours of work of the Discovery Analyst, whether a good decision is often worth much more. You know that, given that the last successful few years of your company are, in hindsight, effective management of many, often competing, initiatives.

That’s one of the benefits of a Composable Business — meaningful data at your fingertips.

A road to the future

Let’s go back to the present times. The vision presented above looks exciting, but how to go from today to there? To shed some light on digital transformation & acceleration, let’s write down a simple, repeatable roadmap.

1. Discover a potential source of useful business information and catalog it
2. Orchestrate a process to keep sourcing information in a known data format
3. Reach autonomy by exposing the data to anyone interested in gaining access to it
4. Maintain modularity at each step by isolating these sources in the smallest possible yet coherent Packaged Business Capabilities.

It’s not a coincidence that these four steps are related to the core tenets of Composable Business, as defined by Gartner: discovery, modularity, orchestration and autonomy.

In 2021 and 2022, Gartner, an IT research and advisory company, considered composability one of the main trends in connecting technology and business. They come up with bold statements, including more money, more resilience and more everything to companies that adopt composability. They are partially correct.

You can read their keynote here. Suppose you are a fan of purposefully vague language. In that case, you’ll be satisfied with sentences and quotes, such as “Sixty-nine percent of corporate directors want to accelerate enterprise digital strategies and implementations to help deal with the ongoing disruption”.

This is not a new idea. 

It’s more a matter of shifting perspective to accommodate years of experience of what software can and cannot do for you. That’s true. There are certain limitations to software development, and one should be aware of that.

To follow that with something illustrative, let’s say that an upside-down building is a marvellous architectural sight but not terribly useful. We have one such art installation in Szymbark, Poland. The rest of our houses are a bit more traditional in fashion.

I don’t want to multiply the terms used needlessly. Still, if you are curious, the Composable Business approach is a way of aligning business with current practices in technology: Domain-Driven Design (2003), DevOps movement (the 2010s) and Agile software development (2001).

Packaged Business Capabilities and API access

Let’s approach our roadmap in two ways and learn by example what a Packaged Business Capability and API access are.

1. Discover a potential source of useful business information and catalog it
2. Orchestrate a process to keep sourcing information in a known data format
3. Reach autonomy by exposing the data to anyone interested in gaining access to it
4. Maintain modularity at each step by isolating these sources in the smallest possible yet coherent Packaged Business Capabilities.

Let’s use retail as an example.

The traditional way

In the traditional way, no custom software is being developed. Assume that everything is done with a team of people and common tools such as Excel.

1. You discover that promotions given to loyal customers are increasing their retention. You’d like to explore more on that, so you form a team dedicated to this task.
2. The team looks at the sales data, creates hypotheses, and manages to send promotional emails to loyal customers. They note down which campaign works in documents so they can present a short report on how their work contributes to gross sales each quarter.
3. Other people can ask them for insights, for example, the product design team. This typically happens in a discussion format.
4. The team is autonomous, and the way of their process is isolated from other changes in the company – and they can adapt to circumstances quickly if needed.

The “packaged” way

Here we develop a custom Packaged Business Capability supporting an operator in a task. The Packaged Business Capability publishes its own Application Programming Interface (API) – a well-defined and readily available way to access its own data and information.

1. You discover that promotions given to loyal customers are increasing their retention. You’d like to explore more on that, so you develop software and train operators for that software.
2. The software accesses Sales API and allows the operator to create hypotheses and send promotional emails to loyal customers. The data relating to each campaign is stored for future purposes. The Promotion API is then created for anyone in the company to access and use.
3. Based on that information, the product design team can look at the promotions in real-time and determine new product lines to be created and discontinued. And not only them. Every team can write or buy a program to access the data in a way
4. The Promotions API should never merge with the Sales API. Or with any other API in the company. Keeping them separate avoids a situation where making changes to Promotions and Sales gets increasingly difficult with time because the software chains them together.

Comparison

You can see a few key differences between these two approaches.

The Application Programming Interface/Packaged Business Capacity approach liberates access to knowledge that today is present in people’s minds working in small teams and either inaccessible anywhere else at all or difficult to access. It enables transparency, and it allows speed. 

The better the API is designed, the more value it brings. It helps you then use that knowledge to make informed decisions on all levels of the organization and gives people autonomy. 

No longer do you need to spend a few years in the company to get to know all the people who get the job done. 

The future, again. Virtual meeting.

Rinse and repeat many times, and your company becomes composable.

You are sitting at a virtual meeting. 

Present at the meeting are the following people:

• Initiative owner
• her team
• CFO
• COO
• and you, dear reader.

Discovery Analyst has prepared for you Business Intelligence insights from the Promotions API, Sales API and Budgeting and Purchases API (outsourced to another company). You look at the data and think about whether to increase spending on A Certain Strategic Initiative. The time to start the discussion has arrived.

I keep my fingers crossed for a successful decision to be made.